Monsanto pledges $4 million to help save monarch butterflies

Biotech giant Monsanto announced it would spend $4 million on efforts to save the monarch butterfly population after the company’s pesticides have been accused of destroying the insects’ habitat and bringing them to the brink of extinction.

The St. Louis-based company said Tuesday it would contribute $3.6 million
over three years to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation's
Monarch Butterfly Conservation Fund. Another $400,000 will go to
universities and conservations groups trying to rescue the
species.

Monsanto’s initial $1.2 million grant matches the contribution of
the US Fish and Wildlife Service to the conservation fund, with
the other $2.4 million earmarked to match commitments from the
federal government over the next three years. The funding is
intended to support “habitat restoration, education and
outreach, and milkweed seed and plant production.”

Monsanto’s announcement claims the company will expand and
improve “more than 10 million acres of quality, distributed
habitat by 2025,” provide 100,000 milkweed plants for
planting in “priority landscapes,” and reach 100,000
growers with guidance plans to create and protect monarch
habitats, among other things.

According to a study by the Center for Food
Safety, close to 99 percent of milkweed in the Midwest’s corn and
soybean fields has been destroyed by pesticides such as
Monsanto’s Roundup, the most common herbicide in American
agriculture today, used in tandem with the company’s
genetically-engineered Roundup Ready crops. Milkweed plants are
the only spots where monarch butterflies lay eggs and the only
food source for their larvae.

Since Roundup’s introduction, the number of monarch butterflies
has drastically dropped, from one billion in 1997 to 56.5 million
this past winter, according to the Center for Biological
Diversity. The finding was cited in a February lawsuit filed by
the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) against the US
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), over the agency’s approval
of Roundup for use.

“Glyphosate has wiped out the milkweed they need to
survive,” Sylvia Fallon, a senior scientist at NRDC, said at
the time. “EPA completely ignored the impact on monarchs when
it granted this new approval, and seriously underestimated the
toxicity for people.”

The Center for Biological Diversity, the Center for Food Safety
and the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation have
petitioned the US Fish and Wildlife Service to list the
subspecies of monarch (Danaus plexippus plexippus) as endangered.

The orange-and-black spotted monarchs are renowned for migrating
several thousand miles across the US, Canada and Mexico. In
addition to their natural beauty, monarch butterflies play an
important role in ecology. They carry pollen from plant to plant,
helping fruits and flowers to produce new seeds. In their
caterpillar stage, they are a food source for birds, mammals and
other insects.

“While weed management has been a factor in the decline of
milkweed habitat, the agricultural sector can absolutely be part
of the solution in restoring it,” said Monstanto President
and Chief Operating Officer Brett Begemann in a statement
Tuesday.

Among the recipients of Monsanto’s grant money is the University
of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, which is tasked with identifying
priority areas for milkweed restoration. Monarch Watch, a
research group at the University of Kansas, would produce and
distribute milkweed on public lands along the butterflies’
migratory path. The University of Illinois at Chicago has a
program to identify and prioritize available public and private
lands for seeding with milkweed, while the Iowa Monarch
Conservation Consortium is supposed to work with farmers.